David Stromberg Presents Isaac Bashevis Singer's Simple Gimpl in conversation with val vinokur
Thursday, March 23 at 7:00 PM
CBE Chapel, 274 Garfield Place
In partnership with Community Bookstore and Restless Books
Brooklyn Jews is thrilled to welcome writer and scholar David Stromberg in celebration of the new edition of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Simple Gimpl. Stromberg will be in conversation with Val Vinokur, Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Director of Jewish Culture at the New School's Creative Writing program. Copies of Simple Gimpl will be available for purchase from Community Bookstore.
One of the most influential stories of the 20th century, Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's Simple Gimpl is the story about a hapless yet charmingly resilient baker named Gimpl, who resists taking revenge on the town that makes him the butt of every joke. Yet, unlike every other major work of Singer’s published in his lifetime, the author had no involvement in the English translation. In this new, gorgeously produced, bilingual edition of Singer’s classic, literary scholar David Stromberg has completed Singer’s previously unpublished partial translation, allowing readers to see another dimension of the original. Beautifully illustrated by New Yorker contributor and Instagram sensation Liana Finck, this unique take on Singer's classic is a treat for literature lovers.
David Stromberg, a writer, translator, and literary scholar, is editor for the Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust. His books include Baddies, Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy, and A Short Inquiry into the End of the World. He is the editor of Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Princeton, 2022).
Val Vinokur has been published in such venues as Common Knowledge, The Boston Review, McSweeney's, LitHub, The Russian Review, Zeek, The Massachusetts Review, Journal of Religion and Society, The Literary Review, and New American Writing. His book, The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas, was published by Northwestern University Press and was a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his and Rose-Myriam Réjouis' translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's trilogy Amour, Colere et Folie -- a lost classic of Haitian literature -- for Random House Modern Library (2009). Rejouis and Vinokur have also translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco (Pantheon Books, 1997). His translation of Isaac Babel’s stories was published in 2017 by Northwestern University Press. He is the founding editor of Poets & Traitors Press and is the author of Relative Genitive: Poems, with Translations from Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky.